“And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of Him who sits on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb: For the great day of His wrath is come; and … Continue reading →

Follow me on Twitter

History Quotations

More history's made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills, and proclamations. ~John Barth

History paints the human heart. ~Napoleon Bonaparte

If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday. ~Pearl Buck

People tend to forget that the word 'history' contains the word 'story.' ~Ken Burns

Histories are a kind of distilled newspapers. ~Thomas Carlyle

Even the most painstaking history is a bridge across an eternal mystery. ~Bruce Catton

History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. ~Winston Churchill

History is a jangle of accidents, blunders, surprises and absurdities, and so is our knowledge of it, but if we are to report it at all we must impose some order upon it. ~Henry Steele Commanger

History studies not just facts and institutions, its real subject is the human spirit. ~Fustel de Coulange

The past is not a package one can lay away. ~Emily Dickinson

History offers some consolation by reminding us that sin has flourished in every age. ~Will Durant

Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him. ~Dwight D Eisenhower

Men have need of history because, without it, the past threatens to overwhelm them. ~Guy Fregault

History never looks like history when you are living through it. ~John W Gardner

History is not the past, but a map of the past drawn from a particular point of view to be useful to the modern traveler. ~Henry Glassie

Civilization today reminds me of an ape with a blowtorch playing in a room full of dynamite. It looks like the monkeys are about to operate the zoo, and the inmates are taking over the asylum. ~Vance Havner

The Past lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne

A mere compilation of facts presents only the skeleton of History; we do but little for her if we cannot invest her with life. ~Hannah Farnham Lee

Isn't it amazing the way the future succeeds in creating an appropriate past? ~John Leonard

Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted. ~Mary McCarthy

A nation that forgets its past can function no better than an individual with amnesia. ~David McCullough

History is the story of events, with praise or blame. ~Cotton Mather

One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present. ~Golda Meir

The historian has been the hearth at which the soul of the country has been kept alive. ~John Morley

History is never antiquated, because humanity is always fundamentally the same. ~Walter Rauschenbusch

The challenge of history is to recover the past and introduce it to the present. ~David Thelen

History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies. ~Alexis de Tocqueville

There is no simple lesson in history...it is human nature that repeats itself, not history. ~John Toland

History is the open Bible: we historians are not priests to expound it infallibly: our function is to teach people to read it and to reflect upon it for themselves. ~George Macaulay Trevelyan

It might be a good idea if the various countries of the world would occasionally swap history books, just to see what other people are doing with the same set of facts. ~Bill Vaughan

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future. ~Jessamyn West

It is a great pity that every human being does not, at an early stage of his life, have to write a historical work. He would then realize that the human race is in quite a jam about truth. ~Rebecca West

The historian lays humanity on the couch. ~Lynn White Jr

The real history does not get written, because it is not in people's brains but in their nerves and vitals. ~Alfred North Whitehead

Our land is everything to us ... I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We remember that our grandfathers paid for it—with their lives. ~John Wooden